The Atlanta Opera
Bizet: Carmen (billed as “The Threepenny Carmen”)
(2021 video produced from the company’s “Big Tent” live performance series, April 15 — May 8, 2021)
Video release date (streaming debut): August 12, 2021, Spotlight Media
• Cast: Megan Marino (Carmen), Jasmine Habersham (Micaëla), Richard Trey Smagur (Don José), Michael Mayes (Escamillo), Tom Key (Lilas Pastia), Sonia Olla (Flamenco Dancer), Calvin Griffin (El Dancairo), Alejandra Sandoval (Frasquita), Gabrielle Beteag (Mercedes).
• Creative: Jorge Parodi, conductor; Tomer Zvulun, stage director; Felipe Barral, videographer & video editor; Bruno Baker, assistant director; Julia Noulin-Merat, set designer; Joanna Schmink, costume designer; Erin Teachman, projection designer; Marcella Barbeaus, lighting designer.
Giorgio Koukl | 13 AUG 2021
The Atlanta Opera has done it again.
After reviewing the company’s film of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in February, logically my expectations for Georges Bizet’s Carmen were quite high, mixed with a certain anxiety of what could go wrong with the far more complex structure such as Bizet intended. Well, let’s anticipate the résumé right now: it was a breathtaking volcano of colors, ideas, theatrical beauty, and extremely solid singing.
George Bizet wrote only six operas, all of them from various exotic destinations, the last of them being Carmen. He valued it as his best score, but the first Parisian production in march 1875 was a complete flop. The refined French public, accustomed to far more glamorous settings, simply was not interested in a somehow sordid story of an officer and a promiscuous girl, all placed in a fictive Seville, Spain. Bizet was upset and angry. Just three months after, he died prematurely at the age of only 37 years.
The opera luckily made a detour of various countries with great success and returned to Paris, where, with sumptuous sets and a glamorous presentation, it won the hearts of the public once and forever.
But let us return to The Atlanta Opera’s new Spotlight Media production. Videographer Felipe Barral, with all his capacities of intuition, creativity, and sense of beauty which he without a doubt possesses, was certainly a guarantee to a solid result. This time no external inserts were used, so all the action develops in “The Big Tent,” which is a fact limiting a lot the artistic means, but also a fortune because no stylistic glitches are present and the action flows without any danger of “missing the point.”
As supposed all the angles of camera lenses are near to perfection as they already have been in the precedent productions. The narration is flawless, the enormous artifact of cutting out of the story lasting nearly three hours only 100 minutes of original content and so omitting all the sumptuosity of the big choirs, which are spread throughout the whole opera, is a small miracle. I could find only two small, at least for me, irritating points: the strange objects, clearly electronically generated, falling downward in distinct moments during the video, are maybe not such a great idea and also the double or even triple juxtaposition of, how to call it: an Escamillo promotion spot, made by clearly too simple video techniques are quite a nuisance.
But let’s consider all the other great contributions to the video. Translating a 19th-century story into a near today’s location of Texas is a great idea and extremely well made. You simply have to love the police officer Don José with all his naivety and transforming the fanfare calling back home all the officers of the original story into a ringtone of a smartphone with clearly visible caller ID: “Mom” is simply a touch of genius.
Jasmine Habersham as Micaëla and Richard Trey Smagur as Don José. (credit: Felipe Barral)
But there is more. The presence of such a typically American telephone booth on stage which can supply the same service as the already seen but necessary if annoying plastic cages is just another great contribution. The great advertisement of the main sponsor behind the bar is also a nice touch and not disturbing at all, I mean as long as Carmen has not to fly away with Delta it’s okay.
Here in Europe, we have been accustomed for nearly a half-century to so-called “artificial actualization.” Seeing Wagner with the Nazi troops marching in, or singers of Donizetti acting in blue jeans became so much of a reality that all the successive directors simply had to come up with more and more shocking ideas. But as you can imagine there is a limit and after a while, the bad taste prevailed.
Luckily none of this is present in Atlanta Opera’s production, directed by Tomer Zvulun. If an actualization takes place it is made with extreme sensitivity and a good sense of proportion. And, believe me, that is rare in the operatic world of today. In this case, the viewers certainly will pardon the small incongruousness like the horrible LED lights on Escamillo’s pants, producing even a maybe not wanted ironic effect of seeing him leave the stage and entering into the darkness with only the lights flashing like a carnival skeleton or the fact that Don Josè, after killing Carmen, is supposed to wait until his arrest and not to try to kill himself as suggested.
Megan Marino as Carmen (credit: Felipe Barral)
Let’s speak a little more about the musical side of the opera. In the dangerous den of alcohol and sex called the Threepenny Tavern, all the singers are perfectly well chosen. Megan Marino was great as Carmen, a difficult role to sing and usually avoided like the plague by singers I know because of its need for a great voice and at the same time for a perfect body to be credible as a seductive girl. Richard Trey Smagur, who plays Don Josè, has an incredible voice, with a capacity in the highest register to produce notes without the least visible effort.
The character of Lilas Pastia, portrayed by actor Tom Key, surely merits extra consideration. He is here fulfilling the role of a narrator, but what a narrator he is! With his raspy voice and a perfect sad but savvy expression of a man who has seen it all in his lifetime, he will be your host for all the moments which have been omitted from the original story. So he is perfectly credible when speaking about the testosterone of Escamillo (Michael Mayes) or how great they are in the Threepenny Tavern at making corpses disappear — a character you will certainly learn to love.
Tom Key as bar owner Lilas Pastia narrates (credit: Felipe Barral)
All the other roles were credible and acted extremely well. Reducing the orchestra to only a few instruments, a choice made similarly in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, this time went less well. Maybe this is due to a different orchestration technique of the French, but this time I really missed hearing the full orchestra. Besides that, the rhythmic imprecision of the orchestra was quite frequent and this is a real shame. Maybe a better cure of the recording quality of the small group of musicians would be beneficial? Especially considering that the most tricky part, that of recording the voices of singers moving across all the stage, was made in near perfection with wireless microphones they wore. Today’s technology when compared to what was available ten or twenty years ago has made great progress.
But besides all this technical stuff, which is interesting to an average listener only to a certain degree, what counts is the overall emotional impact of this production.
It is here that The Threepenny Carmen has its strongest point. The interaction of all the professionals involved creates a unique chef d’oeuvre in today’s challenging times. As is justly underlined in the film’s introduction, The Atlanta Opera is one of only a few opera companies in the world that succeeded in presenting new live productions in 2020-21 among the otherwise empty opera theaters throughout the world, and the only opera company in the United States to do so – a fact of which Atlanta can be truly proud. ■
For more information, ticketing and subscriptions, visit atlantaopera.org
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